Friday, June 5, 2009

When Opera 10 beta was released two days ago, we got to see a cool new feature – thumbnail previews in the tab bar. The tab bar of the latest Opera browser is resizable. If you hold the bottom edge of the tab bar and drag it down, the tabs changes to display thumbnail previews of the opened pages. Looks cool.

Thumbnail previews in Opera 10 beta

Now if you want something similar in Firefox, there is an addon already available - Tab Sidebar. This addon provides a sidebar in the browser that can act as a replacement to the main tab bar, complete with always visible preview thumbnails and in tab navigation buttons. Though originally intended to remain at the sides, this toolbar can be moved from it’s position and placed at the top replacing the tab bar. And when it does, it resembles the tab bar on Opera 10.

Thumbnail previews in Firefox

After you have installed the addon, open the Options box and change the Position to “Top”. Make sure the checkbox “Hide tab bar when sidebar is open” is checked.

The tab bar previews doesn’t look as good and slick as in Opera but it’s okay. An extra feature the Firefox one has is the ability to display ‘live’ previews. When you scroll the page, the previews scroll too, if you hover the mouse over some link and a window pop-ups, you will see the pop-up in the preview too. You can turn this feature off if you want to in the Options.